individual struggle Quotes

Individual interests now trump any consideration of the good of society just as all problems are ultimately laid at the door of the solitary individual, whose fate is shaped by forces far beyond his or her capacity for personal responsibility.

We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.

In this game, you're on your own. You either sink or swim.

It is the tragic story of the cultural crusader in a mass society that he cannot win, but that we would be lost without him.

No one else can take risks for us, or face our losses on our behalf, or give us self-esteem. No one can spare us from life's slings and arrows, and when death comes, we meet it alone.

The reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a single fact. Every man is born under the yoke, and grows up beneath the oppressions of his age. He can only get a vision of the unselfish forces in the world by appealing to them, and every appeal is a call to arms. If he fights he must fight, not one man, but a conspiracy. He is always at war with a civilization. On his side is proverbial philosophy, a galaxy of invisible saints and sages, and the half-developed consciousness and professions of everybody. Against him is the world, and every selfish passion in his own heart.

For an individual as well as a society, there is a gulf between merely living and living worthily. To fight in a battle and live in glory is one mode. To beat a retreat, to surrender and to live the life of a captive is also a mode of survival.

I had grown tired of standing in the lean and lonely front line facing the greatest enemy that ever confronted man – public opinion.

It's good for me to fight in the U.K.

Most people don't need to work as hard as I do.

Golf is you against yourself.

I'm humbled and enormously grateful to be connected to [Franz] Kafka in a any way. He is one of the writers I admire. I think he has been a big influence on me. I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society - which is true in all his books.

Everybody Sails alone, but we can travel side by side

My part of the game is that I must live the best I can.

You have to get an individual who's willing to actually struggle with the system to change it. As long as you have people who - to make substantive changes, to make infrastructure changes.

If life be a war, it seemed my destiny to conduct it single-handed.

The individual and society have waged a relentless and bloody battle for ages, each striving for supremacy, because each was blind to the value and importance of the other.

I feel I work as hard, if not harder, than anyone.

It's hard enough for a person to keep their own socks pulled up, let alone someone else's.

I like movies that project a dilemma of modern men and women who are overwhelmed by the system.

What if evil doesn't really exist? What if evil is something dreamed up by man, and there is nothing to struggle against except out own limitations? The constant battle between our will, our desires, and our choices?

You can't live up to what people expect. Nobody can. But I guess that's my problem, not theirs.

The history of mankind is a perennial tragedy; for the highest ideals which the individual may project are ideals which he can never realize in social and collective terms.

People aren't evil and people aren't good. They live how they can one day at a time. They come out of dust they go back to dust, dusty feet, no wings, and whose fault is that?

It's easier to be Eric Idle than to be Paul McCartney.